Forgotten Trope

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These are the tropes that are one step beyond Dead Horse Tropes and Discredited Tropes; not only are they not used straight, they're not used at all. You won't find this in any current series; they have disappeared from the writer's toolbox.

Note that Forgotten Tropes aren't actually forgotten, Future Imperfect-style, otherwise would we even be talking about them here? Academics will know all about them, and a few minutes with a web search engine will turn up plenty, if you know what to look for. They may, on very, very rare occasions, show up in a modern series, but generally those are only emulating a series that did have these. The best place to find Forgotten Tropes is in "classic" works; there you will see them, frozen like insects in amber. They're also often used by artists relying a great deal on the Nostalgia Filter: Walt Disney, for example, probably did more than anyone else to keep a number of otherwise Forgotten tropes alive.

Often, these tropes were a sign of the times, and as the times moved on so did the tropes, morphing to fit the current standard. Many tropes evolved this way, and while their ancestors went extinct, the fossils remain (as do, occasionally, vestigial features in their descendants). Tropes of this nature are occasionally revived (though only rarely played fully straight without further examination) in the process of invoking Deliberate Values Dissonance for the time period in which they were prevalent, as they typically reflected broader societal views on certain professions or issues. Alternately, a broken trope may be impossible in a work set in the modern day, but work perfectly well in a Period Piece.

Forgotten Tropes without pages

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Older Than Feudalism

"All new jokes!": In Ancient Greece, while having just invented theater, it didn't take long to get to where the average audience member recognized Comedy Tropes as Tropes. How comedic writers dealt with this became a trope in and of itself. As the Fourth Wall wasn't strong, a character would address the audience, say that Tropes Are Not Good, and say how this play was special because of all the Undead Horse Tropes it wasn't using, which was always a lie. The lie was either indirect (listing various tropes it wasn't using, but using other equally hackneyed old tropes) or absolutelybald-faced. Of course, since writing plays was much more competitive, this must have seemed like sports players boasting. But it also implies a truly odd appreciation for tropes and how they get used. Wow! Just think of it: Post-Modernism is actually Older Than Feudalism!

Law of unities: Aristotle was also responsible for the laws of unities, which held that a play should be set in one location, concern one action, and take place in one 24-hour period. These laws were taken seriously for much longer than playwrights honoured them; Samuel Johnson was forced to defend Shakespeare 150 years after the Bard's death over his disregard of the unities. Another nail in the coffin of this trope was writers realizing that these laws were not so much laws as an attempt at description of the plays Aristotle knew about. It was only made law by neoclassisists who made Aristotle's work Serious Business. The decline of reliance on ancient classics meant the end of this trope. Of course, very short, single-setting plays are still being written and performed; it's just that playwrights now do this because it suits the nature of an individual work, not out of some sense of tradition or obligation.

Mozart's Don Giovanni is an especially late example, as English-language playwrights had discarded the idea of the unities a century earlier.

The original Greek Muses: The nine Greek Muses represented art forms that are almost all discarded now (though the Muses live on, they've been reincarnated as patrons of different arts). Clio (Muse of History) and Terpsichore (Muse of Dance) are the only two Muses you can expect a reasonably large number of people to remember, and then only because their names live on in the somewhat obscure words "cliometrics" and "terpsichorean."

Humorism: An ancestor of the Four-Temperament Ensemble Trope, this is a debunked medical belief that dates back to Ancient Egypt, which basically states that a balance of four bodily fluids or humors - blood, mucous, black bile, and yellow bile - in the body are needed for good health. It further states that each fluid is related to one of the four elements or nature and emotions, temperaments, and characteristics are grouped into categories based on one humor. Modern medicine (which realizes the true functions of the humors) debunked this, and the belief rarely shows up nowadays. It does, however, still show up in the use of words such as choleric or sanguine, and knowledge of the basics of this theory is still useful in literary studies due to its copious use in older works.

The Green Ronin D20 book Guide to Fiends presents the Distender, a type of devil who can control emotions in mortals via use of the four humors. (A sidebar in the book briefly summarizes the now-debunked Trope, acknowledging why the theory it is no longer recognized.)

The Anglo-Saxon riddle poem: A game in which a vague poetic description of an item was given and listeners were expected to recall a rote answer, is almost entirely dead today.

The only popularly-remembered example, "Humpty Dumpty," is no longer perceived as a riddle about an egg, just as a poem about an egg. (This is in part due to The Weird Al Effect of Humpty's inclusion in the Alice books.)

Used almost directly by J. R. R. Tolkien in The Hobbit, specifically the riddle-contest between Bilbo and Gollum. Tolkien was aware of the trope because he was an expert on Anglo-Saxon literature, to the point of having done original translations from Anglo-Saxon into modern English.

While no longer considered high art as such, vestiges do still survive in riddles found in modern-day joke books and games on Internet fora (particularly if one of the participants is aware of the idea, either directly or through the influence of The Hobbit).

All Jews are Sephardic: In Medieval Europe and all the way through the Renaissance, the stereotypical Jewish person that would pop up in your average peasant's mind was one of Sephardic origin, since for a while, Spain was the place with the highest Jewish population in the world. People like Maimonides and Baruch Spinoza were well-known among religious or academic circles and thanks to the expulsion of Jews from Spain, the Sephardic stereotype spread to places like England and the Netherlands. In the 19th century, with declining Sephardic populations, dispersion and the rise of Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe (that changed the balance of power among them), this trope was replaced by All Jews Are Ashkenazi. However, as the Western world has become a lot more multicultural thanks to liberalized immigration laws, Hispanic and Middle Eastern Jews are once again beginning to make their presence known in large cities, which means that this trope may well be making a comeback.

The Red Jews: A legendary nation in German folklore that would one day invade the Christian world. It probably saw its major splendor with the Turk attacks that would lead to the fall of Constantinople, when it was popular to identify the Ottomans with the Red Jews stories (absurd, since the Ottomans were mostly Islamic). While unfortunately antisemitism still exists today, the idea of a Great Jewish nation (which nowadays would by default be Israel) invading the West is all but forgotten. Probably the modern equivalent would be other prejudiced tropes like "Jews Control the Media/Economy", but even in those cases, the way they use their power is passive, not violent.

The Nine Worthies: Nine characters who personified the ideal values of a brave knight. They were three pagans (Alexander The Great, Hector and Julius Caesar), three Jewish (Joshua, King David and Judah Maccabee) and three Christians (King Arthur, Charlemagne and Godfrey of Bouillon), thus uniting the three Western religions (polytheism, Judaism and Christianity) with which most Christians at the time were familiar. It was a very popular motif in art and writing, and there was a sort of spin-off (to call it in modern terms) with nine lady worthies (where different artists and writers have different lists). All of those figures are still very well-known, but most people are not familiar with the idea of all of them united in a single concept.

Its most familiar form today would be the New Age's Ascended Masters. The 1871 novel The Coming Race by Bulwer-Lytton was supposed to be a satire of the idea, but H.P. Blavatsky took it seriously...

Medieval fantasy creatures: A lot of medieval creatures are still famous, but the way they're represented and the motifs and traits they're associated with have evolved with time: most modern representations of the unicorn are related to its class, elegance and/or "royalness" and they're seen as delicate animals, but in the first representations they were, if anything, just the opposite: wild, untameable and fiery (for an example, look at the heraldic imagery of the United Kingdom, where it is the unicorn which is chained, not the lion, because the former is considered much more dangerous). Other derived tropes (like the idea that they could only be captured by virgins) are even more forgotten. Vampires and werewolves are seen nowadays as two different species but in the original stories they were seen as two variation of the same kind of creature. Also, the "bloodsucking vampire" stereotype is Newer Than They Think, at least in western Europe. Medieval English tales about "vampires" often described creatures that we would recognize more as zombies today - and very tame zombies, at that. They didn't suck blood, and they usually didn't even hurt anyone; they were just undead people who liked to cause mischief, coming off more as grotesque fairies. The bloodsucker-type comes from Eastern Europe, and was not well-known in the West until the 19th century.

Prester John: A Christian King from a far-away eastern land who somehow kept the faith of his country and would appear to save the West from Islamic/Heathen invaders. It was very common to reference him in stories, folktales and maps. There were different theories about the localization of the Prester John Kingdom, including China, India or Ethiopia, but with the advancement of the age of exploration, more of the world was discovered and the idea of this hypothetical nation faded from most people's minds. It is still remembered by scholars and it still comes out in some modern works of fiction here and there, but even those works are relatively obscure. Stories about mythical countries or lands still exist today (some of them, like Atlantis, are even older), but Prester John as well as the notion of a hidden or forgotten country similar to the West or Christendom in the middle of "barbarian" or "uncivilized" peoples have not only vanished from most mainstream fiction, but would be a point of controversy due to Values Dissonance.

The 1872 book Erewhon would have been recognised by contemporary audiences as a parody of this trope — the narrator stumbles on a far away kingdom (implied to be in Australasia) that perfectly resembles Western society, fantasising that it is a lost tribe of Israel or the kingdom of Prester John. However, Erewhon has a non-Abrahamic religion based around praying to be spared from disease, causing the inhabitants to view moral failure as a misfortune and illness as a personal failing.

A modern reference in Reginald Bretnor's 1974 Papa Schimmelhorn tale "Count Von Schimmelhorn and the Time-Pony".

In Umberto Eco's novel Baudolino (set in the Middle Ages) the main characters go on a quest to find the kingdom.

Termagant: The name of an imaginary god worshipped by Muslims, according to different tales of the Christian West. Of course, as time passed, while clashes between the West and the Muslim world remained sources of controversy, Termagant, as a figure of speech used to describe an evil trickster deity, was forgotten. The term is still used nowadays to describe a violent woman, but even in that context it's dark and obscure, even more the original meaning of the word.

The land of Cockaigne: A legendary land of plenty and abundance that was very popular at the time, being a figure of speech used in poems, paintings and other forms of art, and used as a trope about mythical lands almost as much as in modern fiction we use Atlantis. Sexual liberty, wine, food available without hard labor. The catch? The only way to reach it is going through a river of feces so long, it would take five years to cross it.

"The Joy of Cooking" tags favorite recipes as "Cockaigne" — but has to explain the meaning to modern readers.

The land of Cockaigne is briefly referenced in Shakespeare's Scribe, though as to be expected with such an old reference, Widge has to explain to the reader what it is.

The Drunken Song in Carmina burana refers to it in Latin: "Ego sum abbas Cucaniensis" = "I am the abbot of Cockaigne."

Older Than Steam

Ruler-flattering prologue: The grand operas of the ancien régime period had pompous prologues in which the ruler sponsoring the production was compared to the hero of the story.

Exit after aria: The deeply, deeply annoying exit convention, which required the performer to exit the scene after finishing an aria, caused all sorts of logistical problems, and after the Baroque period was seldom used.

Obesity as a sign of great wealth: This is not entirely dead (with tropes such as the Fat, Sweaty Southerner in a White Suit) but it is certainly a dying trope, replaced by obesity as a sign of working class subsistence on junk food and beer, the price of fresh food, lack of time for home cooking, etc. Meanwhile, physical fitness of the "sweaty gym" variety has been a pursuit of wealthy Westerners at least since the 1970s, and in some cases probably earlier.

In Nigeria in the 1970s, obesity was still a sign of great wealth. Polynesia also had positive connotations to fatness.

19th Century

Fashion satire prints: While exaggerations are pretty much the cream of the crop in satire, there was a time when mocking the fashion trends of the era were commonplace in every editorials from the late 18th century up until the early 20th century. It was easy for the cartoonist to sideline political issues with the excesses of popular culture of the era, and fashion was no exception. It was a time when cartoonists lavishly ridiculed the gigantic wigs and frou-frou styles of the late 1700s, the contrastingly plain yet slutty sheer muslin gowns of the Regency era, the gigantic hoopskirts and bustles and frills of the Victorian era, and the overly wide hats and very narrow skirts of the 1910s. And all of the prints showed shorter hemlines for comical effect. It wasn't until the 1920s and the 1930s put a halt to these prints due to the influences of film and fashion photography putting in a realistic look of the fashions, and due to the simplicity, the lack of supportive undergarments, and actual shorter hemlines removing the need for ridicule and exaggerations on editorial prints.

Massive formal opera chorus: One convention found in many grand operas of the mid-19th century was the massive formal setpiece chorus in the middle of the middle act (i.e. the second act, or the third if more acts were to come)

The Triumphal March ("Gloria all'Egitto, ad Iside" note Glory to Egypt and to Isis) from Verdi's 1871 Aïda.

Secret Scottish weddings: In British literature up through the mid-1800s, a frequent plot device involved a secret marriage happening in Gretna Green or other Scottish border towns. This was because an English law dating to 1754 allowed the parents of people under 21 to stop them from marrying; Scottish law had no similar provision, and, further, allowed almost anyone to perform a marriage as long as two witnesses were present. Moreover, the wedding announcement could be held back from English newspapers. Gretna Green is still a popular venue for destination weddings, and turns up in that capacity in modern works, but its use in novels like The Woman in White to reveal a secret wedding in a character's past is now mostly forgotten even in period pieces.

Columbia: Columbia was a poetic 19th century name for the United States of America (it is the "C" in "Washington D.C."). Columbia herself was represented as a young woman (or goddess) and was a popular national personification into the early 20th century. Since then she has been displaced by another American personification — "Uncle Sam".

The patriotic song "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean" had a similar period of popularity.

"Columbia" was also used as a synonym for the continent(s) of America, hence the names of the South American nation of Colombia and the Canadian Province of British Columbia (and the latter is even on the opposite coast from the one where Christopher Columbus operated). And Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean is still performed.

Many older American memorials and monuments still depict Columbia, the most notable and newest of which is the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, dedicated in 1949 in Hawaii.

The statue atop the US Capitol dome, while not officially of Columbia, shares many of her characteristics.

In Alex Ross's graphic novel Uncle Sam, there's a sequence where Sam meets up with Columbia to discuss the good old days.

About the only place you will see poor old Columbia these days is at the opening of a "Columbia Pictures" flick: she is the woman holding the torch. note Apparently she was always meant as a composite figure, but her incarnations may include, among others, Claudia Dell, Amelia Batchler, Jane Bartholomew, and today's version, Jenny Joseph.

Columbia, Marianne, John Bull, Britannia, and Uncle Sam are all gods in the World War II setting in Scion.

Uncle Sam himself replaced the almost entirely forgotten Brother Jonathan as national personification of the USA. (Jonathan was the brother of Britain's national personification John Bull, the satirical joke was that they did not get on although they looked almost identical).

Brother Jonathan is referred to in the Flashman novel Flashman and the Mountain of Light.

Irish national personifications: All of the traditional personifications of Ireland (Róisín Dubh, Kathleen Ni Houlihan, the Shan Van Voght, the Maid of Erin) are forgotten, mainly because they're seen as incredibly dated.

Big boy pants: It used to be a rite of passage for a child to start wearing long pants and skirts. Younger children — both boys and girls — wore short pants with a dress or skirt over them, so that the material would not be worn out during playtime. Once you were old enough, you were trusted to wear long pants. By the 1940s, young children began using long pants. The expression "big boy pants" is still around, but now it's just a vague metaphor about growing up.

The variant about young girls wearing short skirts makes a significant appearance in Fingersmith.

This trope is far from being forgotten in manga and is used mostly for school uniforms like in Shinkuu Yuusetsu.

The title character of Auntie Mame is shown as free-spirited because she gives her nephew long pants to wear in his childhood.

In The Music Man, Harold Hill's warnings of juvenile delinquency begin: "The minute your son leaves the house, does he rebuckle his knickerbockers below the knee?" Like several of the following warnings, this was likely intended as a period cultural reference.

In the 1960s, psychedelia's association with childish thought and a new fascination with youth led to adult women dressing in clothes similar to what children wore, leading to the invention of the miniskirt. Nowadays, the miniskirt is associated with its sexual subtext, rather than the childishness that was more important to Mary Quant at the time.

French opera ballet: The mandatory ballet in French grand opera is a trope long forgotten.

Composer Jules Massenet, presumably after one too many times being forced to shoehorn a ballet in, not only lampshades it in Manon by having the ballet girls of the Paris Opera brought to a party, but justifies it, as he manages to tie it into several different plots — it's an expensive attempt by Manon's rich Stalker with a Crush to win her from the man she's playing courtesan to, but just beforehand, Manon learns that des Grieux, her true love who she threw over in favour of riches, is about to become an abbot, and this leads to her ignoring the performance, as the first sign of her redemption. Unfortunately, said Stalker with a Crush begins conspiring against her after that.

When Wagner's Tannhäuser was being premiered in Paris, he was told that they'd have to insert a ballet; he could either write one, or they'd pay someone's brother-in-law to arrange some of the thematic material from the opera into it. He said he'd write one, and that the place where it would make the most sense plot-wise would be in the very first scene. The management told him it would have to be in 'the middle of the middle' because that was when they seated latecomers. Said latecomers were aristocratic patrons of the Paris Opera, who liked to dine at their clubs and thus couldn't be bothered to be there when the opera started, but still wanted to see the ballet, as they were romantically interested in the dancers themselves. Tannhäuser still premiered with its ballet at the beginning, but the uproar it caused led to interruptions, and the production was withdrawn after three performances.

Carmen was originally produced at the Opéra-Comique, which permitted spoken dialogue. It was soon adapted into a French grand opera, with the dialogue replaced by recitatives by Ernest Guiraud, and a ballet added to the fourth act. Many productions include the recitatives but omit the ballet.

Die Fledermaus, though a Viennese light opera, has a ballet in the middle of its second act that seems to be usually cut, even though it's one character's excuse for being there.

Victorian children memorizing poems: In Victorian schools, rote memorization was thought to be good for the mind as well as instilling discipline. Aficionados of Victorian novels and autobiographies will be familiar with children having to "get" a number of "lines", usually of Bible verses, poetry or a Shakespeare play. Along with adult works, poems were written especially for this purpose, exemplifying virtues for children to emulate. This practice trickled down into family life, and children were expected to appear at adult parties to "say their piece", sing, play an instrument or dance. The mania surrounding Shirley Temple kept this going through the 1930s and 40s, and merged with Beautiful Baby contests (which have a variety of origins) to become Child Beauty Contests.

Lewis Carroll parodies this in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by having Alice actually base part of her identity on her ability to recite, only to have it turn into Word Salad. Children who'd been forced to recite that damn "How doth the little busy bee" poem would have loved Carroll's hysterical mangling.

Some early Peanuts strips had one or more characters struggling to memorize a poem for school.

In Gypsy, one of the favors Rose offers in the song "Mr. Goldstone" is to "have June recite a poem." Of course, she is a Stage Mom.

In Swallows and Amazons, Nancy and Peggy's tyrannical great-aunt decides to punish them by having them learn a poem and recite it from memory. The girls' uncle comes to their rescue by suggesting Casabianca, which he knows they already know.

Rags to Riches via clean living: In the late 19th century, the Rags to Riches trope usually involved a poor yet clever and virtuous boy who rises to affluence through hard work and clean living (and phenomenal luck, but they won't tell you that). This trope was arguably the basis of Social Darwinism, but it died sometime during the forties and no one can say why for certain. Presumably it had something to do with the immensity of the Wall Street Crash (for if people got rich by hard work and clean living, did that mean all those that lost wealth were lazy and uncouth, along with unlucky?), the influence of the World War II experience (with Hitler's Germany being a horrific case of many of the tenets of Social Darwinism put into action), the New Deal (which made people question the idea of individuals purely responsible for their success) and the nascent civil rights movement (springing from demographics of people who had been denied success for the color of their skin, not for the content of their character, even though Booker T. Washington to some degree embraced the theme).

The British equivalent is Dinah Craik's John Halifax, Gentleman and Samuel Smiles' Self-Help.

Charles Dickens' work ranges from unintentionaltrope overdose (Oliver Twist) to low-end Subversion (Great Expectations) to high-end Subversion (Hard Times). The last-named features a supporting character (Josiah Bounderby) who claims that his mother abandoned him soon after his birth, and that he was completely independent by the age of three. It is later revealed that his parents adored him, and scrimped and sacrificed so that he might receive a good education and a promising apprenticeship. He then rose rapidly through the ranks of society, and deserted his doting parents in their old age.

The young readers' novel Montmorency could be considered a parody, as it features a dirt-poor youth who ascends to the aristocracy through hard work ... by robbing Londoners and faking his way into high society.

Christmas ghost stories: Actually very common in the Victorian era. Today the only one widely remembered is a A Christmas Carol and thus most people don't realize there were many others of its ilk, but telling ghost stories around Christmas was a common tradition. A reference to it remains in the song "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year" that seems fairly weird to modern listeners. It also occurs in the framing prologue of The Turn of the Screw.

Dundrearyisms: Nowadays, people only remember the play Our American Cousin because it was the one Abraham Lincoln watched the night of his assassination. But back in the day, the play was actually pretty popular, especially Lord Dundreary, an eccentric character that became the Ensemble Darkhorse. He was so popular that the strange, twisted aphorisms he used became a brief vogue known as "Dundrearyisms" (e.g. "birds of a feather gather no moss"). It almost goes without saying that after the presentation at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1865, everything about this play was soon forgotten, including this interesting example of what today we would call Memetic Mutation.

The school for young women: Young women (especially those from wealthy families) attending "finishing schools", to be trained in the arts of music and dance, style, etiquette, party-hosting, and homemaking, with the goal of training them to be good wives and mothers in the near future. This trope fell out of favor as attitudes towards education, marriage, women's rights, and the role of women in society changed. The trope is still alive in East Asia, however, where traditional gender roles are more firmly entrenched, and Swiss-style schools are seeing an explosion of popularity.

Used in Psycho-Pass, though ruthlessly lampshaded. It's explained that the idea of a "lady" is completely irrelevant to the modern world, but as long as rich old men want a wife like that, there's a market for schools that produce them.

Turn of the Century

The "10-20-30" melodrama: a long-extinct genre of theatrical productions which used many tropes now more typically associated with early silent films like The Perils of Pauline. The "10-20-30" name was derived from the cheap ticket prices charged for these productions - 10 cents, 20 cents, 30 cents. Interestingly, the name itself became obsolete during the very heyday of these melodramas ("15-25-35" would have been more accurate.)

Romantic operetta waltz song: A major trope in early 20th-century operettas was having a big romantic song in slow waltz time with enormous vocal range and mushy lyrics, rendered with lots of rubato. Well-known examples included "Deep In My Heart, Dear" from The Student Prince (which plugged it at least once in each of its four acts) and the title songs of The Desert Song and Sweethearts. These fell out of favor sometime between 1925 and 1930 due to advances in vocal amplification and electric recording that helped make low-voiced "crooners" the new stars of popular music.

This was already obsolete by the mid-20th century when Anna Russell parodied it as "Ah, Lover!"

Invasion literature: A popular British sub-genre of Science Fiction (not named as such at that point) in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. This genre focused on the invasion of Britain 20 Minutes into the Future (or earlier) by a foreign power. This foreign power was most often either France or Germany, depending on which seemed Britain's most likely enemy at the time. Its mainstream incarnation vanished during World War I, presumably because they had actual wars with Germany.

The Battle of Dorking (1871) by George Tomkyns Chesney, the Trope Codifier, though not the Ur-Example. This was written in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war, which had shocked Europe with the speed with which Europe's second-largest army was defeated by a numerically smaller but technically more sophisticated foe. This theme ran through the genre.

Both The Riddle of the Sands (1903) by Erskine Childers and The War of the Worlds (1898) by H. G. Wells ended up having an effect on fiction long after the extinction of the original trope serving as the progenitors of modern espionage thrillers and the Alien Invasion, respectively. The Invasion Fiction lives, but the invader has changed.

A late example is Nevil Shute's What Happened to the Corbetts (1938). By that time, of course, most people had a pretty good idea that something bad was going to happen, even if they didn't know quite how bad it would be.

There were a few American examples of the genre, usually involving the Yellow Peril; the revival of that associated trope during World War II included a novel by Whitman Chambers titled Invasion!.

The "threat to Britain from France or Germany" idea did make it into at least one post-Cold War techno-thriller, Larry Bond's Cauldron. The scenario involves the dissolution of NATO and a war pitting an aggressive France, allied with Germany and much of continental Western Europe, against the US, UK, and most of the former Warsaw Pact, excluding Russia. (However, the notion of England actually being invaded is never brought up.)

A modern example of Invasion Literature most Australians will know of is Tomorrow: When the War Began, wherein Australia is invaded by an unnamed country.

The genre was being parodied as early as 1909, when P. G. Wodehouse wrote his early novel The Swoop, in which England is invaded by the armies of nine different countries at once, only to be driven out by the Boy Scouts. (Oddly enough, in Saki's When William Came, written four years later, the "Boy-Scouts-as-saviours" idea is repeated, entirely seriously. The Scouts don't actually fight off the Germanic hordes, thankfully. Instead, they inspire the population to resistance by boycotting the Kaiser's parade.)

One of the later examples is the comic book series Invasion!, which ran from 1977-9 in 2000 AD. The creators had to change the Russians to "Volgans" and remove representations of Margaret Thatcher and other real life people.

Stealing the help: There's a common Edwardian comedy trope where some aristocrat will have a particularly good cook and their friends will do everything they can to "steal" that servant (because great food is such a crucial part of performing the part of a host). The trope started to disappear as early as the 1920s, when most families - or at least the middle-class ones - stopped wasting money on domestic servants because increased technology was making it easier and more respectable for housewives to do chores themselves.

This gets a modern use in the Miles Vorkosigan novel Memory where his parents and other relatives are tempted to steal away his new cook, Ma Kosti, but that's probably because the series is often social comedy Recycled In Space.

Perhaps a modern variation is the competition by rich families for good nannies, as seen on Desperate Housewives.

Another modern version occurred in the 3rd Rock from the Sun episode "Citizen Solomon", with Dick and Mary fighting over a maid:

Mary: Give me back my maid!

Dick: I'm sorry, Mary, but Cathy is not some product to be bought or sold on the open market. She is a living, breathing human being with feelings, thoughts, and emotions — you don't own her. [beat] I do!

Used in Game of Thrones when Janos Slynt suggests he'll be hiring Tyrions' cook.

Tyrion: Wars haven been started for less.

Shows up in Downton Abbey at several points. One of Mary's suitors attempts to convince Carson, the butler, to work for him as part of his portrayal as evil bastard, and O'Brien is Put on a Bus this way when her actress decided to leave the show.

A few Richie Rich stories involve wealthy matrons trying to entice the Riches' butler Cadbury to work for them, and when that fails, engaging in a tug of war with Mrs. Rich over him, or even kidnapping him.

The Nanny: After she learns that several people have tried to woo Niles away from Maxell in the "Curse of the Grandmas" episode, Fran gets upset when Maxell laughs at the idea that anyone would try to woo her away.

Female hysteria: Before modern psychiatry and medicine, hysteria was once a common diagnosis for a woman with any sort of illness. There are thousands of documented cases of women in real life diagnosed with hysteria (and often institutionalized or otherwise marginalized) who were later found to have had heart attacks, ovarian cancer, schizophrenia, depression, endocrine imbalances, or one of any number of physical or psychological diseases.note Sometimes, all it took was a woman saying "I don't want to have kids!" or "I want to own my own business!" or objecting to her husband having control of her money. These victims of "moral insanity" were frequently institutionalized. Going to a Spooky Séance could also get you diagnosed, because Spiritualists were notorious for promoting feminism. The trope became discredited after women finally got fed up with being told that their problems were all either "in their heads" or made up for attention, and faded from fiction at about the same time.

Hysteria, and more broadly the consistent mis-diagnosis and mis-treatment of women during the 19th and early 20th centuries, is the theme of the classic early feminist short horror story The Yellow Wallpaper.

Ethnic white groups: Ethnic white characters and stories, if they're not outright forgotten, are usually touched on only in historical contexts. This trope was popular among American audiences through the 19th and part of the 20th century, and it consists in the idea that some Caucasian ethnicities aren't truly "white", ergo, not truly American, and it aimed to almost every European ethnic group: Irish (the famous "Irish Need Not Apply" signs in stores and other business), Germans (Those of Catholic origin, although the sentiment extended to Protestants in WWI), Italians, Polish and many more. And very early on many considered that those of English heritage were capable of holding a place in American society. Even those from Nordic countries were frowned upon, most prominently the Dutchnote Primarily by bringing Nordic surnames to American soil (Many English-rooted voters suspected that President Van Buren was not actually American-born). Nowadays, the idea that some ethnic groups couldn't be classified as white seems almost alien to most modern audiences. Heck, even most White Supremacist groups ditched the old Nordicism idea (a concept that held that the superior race/truly white people were only those of Nordic or Germanic roots) and try to integrate all ethnic white groups to their movement. Xenophobia still exists today, but mostly is aimed at non-white groups like Latinos, Asians, etcetera. Consider how funny it would be if someday Hispanics came to be considered "whites" (which, technically, some of them are) and were among the ones discriminating against a new wave of immigrants in the country. European ethnic identities persist (among Irish, Ashkenazi Jews, and Italians especially), but they don't serve to isolate or alienate such peoples anymore; now they're really just a way for ethnic whites to avoid being classed as the dreaded "Anglo-Saxon." And there are many groups traditionally regarded as "white" or "Western" who still do not qualify as truly white: Arabs, Armenians, and many other Middle Eastern peoples.

The trope was starting to break down as early as the 1920s, when the Ku Klux Klan actually tried - unsuccessfully - to appeal to Irish Catholics (who sometimes shared the Klan's Negrophobia and anti-Semitism), insisting that they didn't hate all Catholics, just "greasy" Latin people and the like (their revulsion toward the Vatican motivated as much by its being Italian as by its being Catholic).

One Simpsons episode showed how incredibly out-of-touch Monty Burns was by having him complain about donutsnote (possibly of Dutch or British origin) as "ethnic food".

Edisonades: A variety of late-19th and early-20th century stories called "Edisonades" were usually about a young man building a tool (usually electric- or steam-powered), going to "untamed lands" (such as the Wild West or Africa), defeating savages and carving out a name for himself. Steam Punk was created partially from a desire to fight the attitudes presented in the Edisonades (despite the genre being dead for several generations).

The "What, Me Worry?" Kid as Advertising: You probably recognize Alfred E. Neuman as the mascot of MAD Magazine. But they didn't invent it, they actually just use it. No one really knows how it started but was one early example of Memetic Mutation: it was used as an advertising tool, mostly by medical services/dentists (but popular enough in other areas like insurances or auto-parts), and it consisted in claiming the procedures the doctor used were painless, with the kid stating "What, me worry?", "It didn't hurt at all" or other similar phrases. This was usually a lie, but a very well-liked one and it was still used all the way to the early twentieth century. But once the satirical magazine appeared and started to employ this image, it was completely associated with the publication, with its history in advertising almost completely, well, forgotten incredibly soon.

Oral Fixation: A feature of Freudian psychology that proposed several distinct mental stages. The first stage was oral fixation, formed during infancy through nursing and typically lost shortly thereafter. Therefore, a person who exhibited an oral fixation (smoking, chewing a toothpick, and sometimes extended to homosexuality) as an adult was thought to be somehow emotionally stunted and immature. The idea was quite popular and well known up until the 1970s and 80s, by which time Freud's ideas had been professionally discredited and the public had moved on to newer pop psychology. It will still pop up on occasion, but hardly ever used in any seriousness.

The smoking song: a song about (tobacco) smoking either banishing worldly worries or inspiring sentimental visions. It probably originally derived from the nineteenth-century opium craze (since smoking opium often caused users to have vivid dreams), only to eventually be replaced by the more socially acceptable use of tobacco in the twentieth century. Songs about smoking certain other things are still alive and well, however.

"A Room on Bloomsbury" in Sandy Wilson's The Boy Friend is one of its more notable 1950s affectionate parodies of old 1920s tropes. In Ken Russell's film, set during a late-20s or early-30s performance of the play, it's presented as sweet but dated.

The extravaganza: the American equivalent of English pantomime, the extravaganza was a family-friendly type of musical using many of the typical pantomime characters and settings (though the "dame" played by a man in drag seems not to have fully caught on). The genre survived until the Great Depression.

Revues, in the first half of the 20th century, were plotless shows that combined song-and-dance numbers with Sketch Comedy, the latter often showcasing top vaudeville performers. As stage productions, revues were essentially ephemeral, with only Breakaway Pop Hit songs being intended to potentially live on after the show closed. The Ziegfeld Follies was New York's longest-running revue series, running from 1907 to 1957, and at its height had an All-Star Cast reputation extending all the way down to its Chorus Girls. In the mid-1920s, revues accounted for nearly half of all new musical shows produced on Broadway. The hitherto annual productions of the Ziegfeld Follies and its major competitors started became increasingly sporadic after that, though the genre's popularity held up until the 1950s, when it rapidly faded with the rise of the Variety Show. During the Rise of the Talkies, many movie studios produced revues, even going to the then-unusual expense of filming them in color.

Cigarette lighter gag: Jokes about cigarette lighters refusing to light were obnoxiously common in the days of vaudeville. Apparently a bit of Truth in Television. The founder of Zippo noted that one of his friends carried a IMCO lighter (which was apparently ugly and unfashionable) "Because it works". He copied and improved the mechanism when he founded his own company.

Extended unimportant montages as film openings: Many films of the 1920s and 1930s feature plot-irrelevant montages of urban life, especially multiple people's daily routines, store displays, manufacturing processes, or popular amusements, much longer than what would be needed for a standard Establishing Shot. Such sequences, leftovers from early cinema in which simply seeing such things was a novel spectacle, eventually vanished unless they were immediately relevant to the plot. They still exist in art and experimental cinema in various forms, but in commercial fiction films it has long since faded from public consciousness.

The "exculpatory preface" before a controversial film: During the early 1930s, when The Hays Code was not effectively enforced and was being regularly flouted, filmmakers felt obliged to immunize themselves against charges of corrupting public morals ("exculpate" means "absolve from blame") by including this, essentially a disclaimer that was held on the screen for a few seconds or so before any picture with a sociopolitical or "edgy" message began. The exculpatory preface insisted (often disingenuously) that the following movie was not a propaganda piece and was not intended to endorse a social or political point of view that might upset people. Perhaps the most notorious of these was the preface bumpering the scandalous 1932 horror film (with a coded civil-rights message) Freaks, which is several paragraphs long and tries to justify the vigilante justice wreaked by the circus freaks in the film. Traces of this custom still turn up occasionally on television, especially when a program is introduced by a "this-does-not-reflect-our-personal-views" disclaimer before any entertainment show with political or otherwise controversial content - but for the most part the popular media do not fear censorship anymore and respect their audience's collective intelligence, reasoning that anyone who is offended by a program can just change the channel or turn off the TV.

The clever young widow pursuing a new husband: Frequently The Ingenue's rival for the protagonist's affections. This character type was popular in the early 20th century, back when young ladies were supposed to be watched over by parents and chaperones before marriage: the widow had the advantages of independence, (moderate) experience and wealth, though the last of these assets often depended on gold-digging among prospective second husbands. The more dangerous Femme Fatale might be this type's eventual descendant.

Mitzi May in Lackadaisy is a modern example in a webcomic set in the 20's. The author is very knowledgeable about the time period, so it's likely an intentional reference.

Dolly Levi in Hello, Dolly! is faintly recognizable as one of these. Though the musical doesn't make much of her widowhood, it's based indirectly on a much older farce.

The circus parade: During the first decades of the 20th century, the arrival of a circus would mean that the whole town stopped to welcome it with a huge parade. This practice became less prevalent beginning with WWII, while by the 1970s it had disappeared. It has a Spiritual Successor in the form of holiday parades, however, most notably the Macy's Thanksgivings Day Parade and the Tournament of Roses Parade (held during New Year's Day), both of which still make extensive use of live music, live animals (though mostly horses), acrobats, stuntpeople, and actors.

Birth equals cigar: For decades, one knew that a baby was born when the father was giving cigars to everyone who crossed his path. This could be justified by how acceptable smoking was until the 1960s/70s, when the trope disappeared into thin air.

A vestige of this persisted at least into the late '90s, in the form of chocolate cigars wrapped in blue or pink foil.

Goat glands as Viagra: In the 1920s, 'goat glands' were a quack remedy for erectile dysfunction and general lack of energy (don't ask how it was done ... Squick). The use of goat glands - with miraculous Popeye-after-Spinach type results - not only became a trope in films themselves, but a film industry term for silent films that had sound hurriedly added to them to bring them up to date. Monkey glands were also used for the same purpose.

The song "Monkey Doodle Doo", from the Marx Bros. movie The Cocoanuts (1929), written by Irving Berlin

Let me take you by the hand

Over to the jungle band

If you're too old for dancing

Get yourself a monkey gland!

Starving Artists' loft apartments: The image of a Starving Artist living in a garret apartment dates from a time when the top floor of a building was the most inconvenient to access and thus rented out for the lowest price. Thanks to elevators, landlords can now rent out lofts for a hefty markup relative to the rest of the building, and Starving Artists had best starve somewhere lower down. If you smear some Big Apple Sauce on this trope, though, it comes back to life with some Truth in Television on its side. Buildings of five floors or fewer in NYC do not have to have elevators. Guess who lives in fifth floor walk-ups in certain neighborhoods.

When found in more recent works, the fifth-floor walkup version (since even these can be expensive in New York) might be combined with the struggling artist also having to have an unsympathetic roommate, as in the movie Trick.

This was a popular enough trope to be parodied by Buster Keaton's film Three Ages.

This gimmick is arguably still with us, in the form of "The History of..." spoofs in comic strips and TV commercials showing stereotyped scenes from past eras, often with Bamboo Technology.

The officer fallen on hard times: The British army commissioned a lot of officers from outside of the traditional officer class during World War I, and after the war most of these men had to return to their former stations in life. This was a popular character type in post-war British fiction, but most of those novels are now forgotten, with one of the few exceptions being Lady Chatterley's Lover, in which Mellors the gamekeeper is a former officer.

40's and 50's

Facial muscle control: As mentioned under Clark Kenting, facial muscle control was used by pulp magazines to handwave Master of Disguise abilities, because it was thought that if a male character wore make-up for a disguise, that would make him a "sissy". Perhaps because of common awareness of the use of make-up in films or the lack of believability of the facial muscle explanation, this trope hasn't been used for a while.

Although this was used in the movie Minority Report, with the aid of an electronic device to relax the muscles.

Homosexuality as a disease: In the past, homosexuality or male effeminacy was frequently described as a mental disorder (if in fact it was discussed at all). Today, attitudes have changed

As late as the 1970s, Mike Brady (played by gay actor Robert Reed) was heard to say in an episode of The Brady Bunch that if he found out that one of his sons was interested in playing with dollhouses, he'd take him to a psychiatrist.

The webcomic Sonichu takes it further and treats it as an actual disease: The series has a plot in which the protagonist creates a vaccine that cures homosexuality (and asexuality) and distributes it for free around the world, resulting in everyone on Earth being heterosexual. This did not last, however.

Films adapted as radio plays: During the 1940s, films were sometimes adapted into radio plays, usually performed by the original cast of the film. The most popular of these radio programs was Lux Radio Theatre, which if it couldn't get the original cast, usually got other A-listers to perform the parts. Television, being a visual medium like film, made such adaptations redundant, though they did still happen to a limited extent even into the 1980s - Star Wars being a very famous example, and also one of the very last produced in this manner.

The genre survives in the UK, where some TV works (most notably Doctor Who) have been adapted to radio; and in Japan, where some anime, like Code Geass, get short stories known as "audio dramas" (which, despite their name, are predominantly comedies).

Ballet sequences in musicals: A trope from Hollywood musicals of the forties and fifties was the ballet sequence — a segment in which the movie broke away from the main action, usually as a dream, to tell a mini-story through stylized interpretive dance. It may have evolved into the Big-Lipped Alligator Moment.

The Big Ballet trend in musicals was started by George Balanchine and "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" from On Your Toes (and revisited in the "biographical" Words and Music), which in turn might have been inspired by the Busby Berkeley Number "Lullaby of Broadway" from Gold Diggers of 1935.

Found as late as Ken Russell's consciously retro film version of Sandy Wilson's The Boy Friend (1971), even though the play itself does not have a ballet sequence. But then, the film is also replete with Busby Berkeley numbers and countless other lovingly-rendered throwbacks to earlier eras.

Sports are still a popular topic for some American newspaper comics (see Tank McNamara), as well as in Japanese manga.

Short stories in comic books: The two-page prose short story featured in many comics from the 1930s up to the early 1960s was due to postal regulations requiring any publication taking advantage of the cheaper magazine bulk distribution rates to have at least two pages of prose or other written content. The popularity of the letters pages and Stan Lee's promotional "Bullpen Bulletins" pages replaced them, and eventually postal regulations changed.

Civilian adventure comics: The dominance of the superhero has all but eliminated the once popular "civilian adventurer" type, who often had an exciting profession and invariably ended up battling criminals and spies. Many early comics featured the likes of aviator Hop Harrigan, TV host Roy Raymond, and adventurer Pep Morgan starring in backup features in the increasingly superhero-dominated anthologies. While some of these characters still exist, they usually survive by either becoming superheroes (like Congo Bill becoming Congorilla) or becoming part of the supporting cast of a superhero comic (like Speed Saunders, who has been tied in with Hawkman). The idea of such characters headlining their own comics is long gone.

Superheroes with a vehicle as their gimmick: The hero whose sole gimmick is a unique super-vehicle of some kind — such as Taxi Taylor, Captain X, and the 1940s Red Torpedo — is all but forgotten, having long since been absorbed by superhero characters like Batman who have other gimmicks and talents besides a Batmobile or the like. A particular subset of these characters, the aviator hero with a special plane, exists today almost entirely in the form of the Blackhawk characters, who also have the gimmick of being a multinational team of flyers.

Captain Falcon of the F-Zero video game series is a modern-day example of this trope: He is a professional race car driver who chases down criminals during days when not racing. This premise, in turn, is undoubtedly an homage to Speed Racer, the most famous example of this trope, albeit a character no longer taken seriously due to his campiness.

Male Heterosexual Life-Partners who share a house: In the first half of the 20th century, this trope was common in children's comic books – sometimes the main characters would even share a bed and showed little or no interest in women. However, in the United States Dr. Frederic Wertham anvilled this point repeatedly in his 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, which sparked a Congressional hearing, after which it became more and more common for adults to interpret this kind of relationship as gay. Wertham emphasized that even the youngest children understood the characters to be gay. This inevitably led to a Gay Panic and mobilized the Moral Guardians, forcing American comic writers and publishers to abandon this trope and make changes specifically designed to avert it and stop the accusations. In Continental Europe there never was a comparable panic, so this trope continued to exist longer, gradually phasing out beginning in the 1970s, but mostly as a result of changing views on masculinity making the use of the trope inviable without being target to snide jokes.

Batman and Robin, until the Gay Panic, when the publishers had Dick Grayson's Aunt Harriet move in with him and Bruce Wayne, and introduced stories where Bruce dated women.

Astérix and Obelix have shown interest in women some times, but they are very close, even for being best friends, will most likely always remain bachelors, and even though they both have their own house, they will often sleep over at each other's places.

Similar housing arrangements can also be found in non-comics literature:

A four-way example would be Biggles and his three chums, Algy, Ginger and Bertie.

Eccentric village characters songs: A folk song trope that isn't used much anymore. In the fifties, there were plenty of songs about eccentric but beloved village characters such as the old lamp-lighter or the old umbrella salesman. Those songs are forgotten except by those very familiar with old songs.

Maddy Prior's "All Our Trades" stands out as a late example of this trope done straight.

Many of Tom Lehrer's songs parody styles and tropes which were old even when he was writing them (although a few had seen revivals at the time); and have now been all but forgotten by any but aficionados of old music.

Everything's greener with chlorophyll: A minor trope in The '50s, afterwards forgotten. The brief fad for chlorophyll as an additive centered on its supposed deodorizing and "healing" properties, not to mention giving products like toothpaste a natural green color. TIME Magazine reported a chlorophyll boom in April 1952 which had become a bust by October of the next year.

In the second Iron Man film, Tony Stark drinks a concoction he says involves chlorophyll to stave off palladium poisoning.

The modern gimmicky plant extract health trend means that chlorophyll is still used in some cult beauty products bragging about their plant credentials. It gives the green colour to MOA's Green Balm (a coconut oil-based moisturiser marketed as a multipurpose 'healing balm') and LUSH's Mask of Magnaminty, and gives supposed anti-aging properties in Asian beauty products like The Saem's Natural-Tox Green Grape sheet mask and Lu Ming Tang's Elixir de Vie eye cream.

All greasers are Italians: A minor trope back in the 50's about the stereotype that all or most greasers were ethnically Italian. It is given a nod in Grease, with roughly half the characters being vaguely of Italian descent (or sometimes not so vague, such as the character of Sonny being bilingual). Nowadays, this subculture is still remembered, but the racial connotation seem to be lost for modern audiences, especially since the '50s youth culture has caught on with all ethnic groups. The reality-TV show Jersey Shore did briefly revive this trope in a more modern context.

Alum gag: One gag used in cartoons was when someone ingested the multi-use substance alum, their lips would tighten to a pucker, their head would shrink, or their voice would increase in pitch. Adult men (and curious children) would have been familiar with alum's indescribable taste from its use as a styptic in the days of double-edged razor shaving, where it was common (and unfortunate) to get some in your mouth by accident. Alum's replacement with more commercial grooming products mean the only people who risk this experience these days are traditional shaving enthusiasts and people who aren't very good at making homemade pickles.

Many brands of modern 'extreme' sour sweets are advertised with shots of people making funny puckering faces; since alum is often used along with citric acid to create the face-sucking kick, this is a mild example of the trope existing today.

Cuba is a hotbed of sin: In pre-Castro Cuba, and especially during the Batista years, the Mafia opened numerous casinos, nightclubs, and places of ill repute in the country to avoid American law enforcement, making it an extremely popular tourist destination. All of this died out with Castro's revolution - in fact, part of Castro's reason for taking over was because he was disgusted over American criminals controlling Cuba's economy. Of course, prostitution and even a thriving gay culture still exist in Cuba and are grudgingly tolerated.

The comic book anthology series: This type of comic book featured multiple genres and art styles waned during the 1940s and 1950s and finally died by the mid-1960s both because the massive size of The Golden Age of Comic Books was no longer viable and because publishers began to realize that single-genre comics were more marketable. Prior to this shift, however, the standard practice was to present short eight-to-ten-page stories, usually a few superhero features, a few pulp-inspired civilian adventurer characters, and various humor strips. When characters like Superman and Batman got self-titled comics featuring only their adventures, the comics still featured multiple short stories about those characters rather than one long story. As late as the mid-1960s, DC Comics still tended to present two stories of the star character in its superhero titles, as well as one or two half-page, usually crudely-drawn gag strip features. By the Bronze Age, however, this format was was abandoned.

Bullets go ping: Movie bullets used to make a long pinging sound whenever they hit a rock or metal surface; this sounds ridiculous to most modern ears, although the similar Bullet Sparks trope remains alive.

Due to its heavy use in old Western films (enough that the sounds are often associated with the genre), pieces paying homage to the classic era of Westerns will use this effect as a shout-out, similar to using the Wilhelm Scream. Red Dead Redemption is a good example of this at work.

Rock and roll music causing juvenile delinquency: This one was fairly widespread during the first few years of rock's existence (mid-1950s, mostly), turning up both in fiction and in real-life accounts. Although juvenile crime is certainly still a problem, rock music hasn't been viewed as a social menace since the 1970s at the very latest, and any complaints from parents about rock and roll nowadays are bound to be about how it supposedly makes young people lazy and stupid, not how it makes them criminals - and as the more highbrow, progressive varieties of rock move more and more into the mainstream, even that trope has started to disappear. Nowadays the complaint is usually about rock music's still sexually provocative image, musicians acting childishly and/or irresponsibly in public, or the superficially (or not) left-wing politics of many rock musicians, and that for hard rock and metal. If you hear a parent denounce rock and roll as literally evil anymore, he or she is almost certainly a fundamentalist Christian - and usually a non-mainstream one, at that. Actually, the last time music was considered to encourage violence was in the 1980s, the culprit most usually being rap music - or, occasionally, Heavy Metal or Punk Rock.

All-Male Stylish Black Musicians - This one has origins in vaudeville. In order to get past the stereotypical view of blacks as unruly "wild men", black performers would don the most dapper suits they could afford and act as refined as possible. This had a deep mark on music for a very long time - think The Four Tops, The Inkspots, Frankie Valli... (The Distaff Counterpart, with black female singers as evening-gowned grandes dames, showed up frequently in the Motown "girl groups.") The trope remained popular in the 70s and 80s, but since the 90s it has been Deader Than Disco with the popularity of urban music in the Afro-American crowd.

Crappy postal service - Mail in the mid-20th century was far from being a reliable service, with many jokes about letters either going to another place or arriving not days or months, but years or decades late. This problem became less common after the inception of the ZIP code in the 60s, and since the 90s the prevalence of e-mail has rendered the trope inoperative.

Uranium Fever - Back in the 50's, uranium became such a valuable commodity for its uses on nuclear energy, it became a modern substitute for gold as "the element that is so valuable it's worth trying to find it" in contemporary pop culture. Examples include songs like "Uranium Fever" as well as the movie of the same name, films like Dig That Uranium, and even cartoons like Rocky and Bullwinkle (where one Aborted Arc began with the improbable news that cereal boxtops had become more valuable than uranium) and The Flintstones (in one episode, Fred feels disappointed after finding out a gold mine he discovered isn't really real gold, but he immediately feels better when at the end of the episode he digs out what it seems to be uranium in a place under the terrain of his home and mentions how he's going to be rich). Then it was discovered how dangerous it is to handle uranium, and it was quickly forgotten. Nowadays a lot of people still know how valuable is, but very few outside of experts and professionals will even try to find it.

Chase Cartoons: After the big success of Tom and Jerry, the idea of having some cartoon character chasing another as the basic premise became a sub-genre in the animation industry. Even parodies like Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner (that took the basic plot and put it to work with the two most unlikeliest animals in the weirdest setting Chuck Jones could think of) was a success in its own right when people took it at face value instead of the satire it was supposed to be. But while a lot of those characters remain beloved icons of the medium, you just don't see a lot of these kind of shows anymore. The very few attempts to revive this premise in later years are seen as obscure, or as cult shows at best.

Rejection Of Kanji: In the early years of Japanese pro wrestling breaking out of small clubs into the mainstream there were three noticeable naming conventions. Real names, most commonly already well know judoka, honorific titles from sumo tradition and common Japanese names written in capitalized letters from the Latin Alphabet. The latter were a sign that a heel was rejecting Japanese characters in the loudest way possible, however, most of the perpetrators ended up undergoing heel face turns and the meaning became forgotten, to the point Kenta Kobayashi simply went with KENTA to distinguish himself from the more established similar sounding Kenta Kobashi, with both acting as baby faces at the same time in NOAH promotion, which seemingly uses all caps just because it looks cool.

The Spanish Civil War veteran: In World War II movies made while the war was still in progress, it was a common trope to establish a character's anti-fascist credentials with a mention that he (and it was always a "he") had fought in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side. The most famous instance of this is Rick in Casablanca. After the war, the Red Scare arrived and Spanish Civil War veterans were branded as communist traitors. As a result, this trope quickly disappeared from subsequent films about World War II. Despite the fact that World War II movies are still made in abundance and that there's much less of a stigma about Spanish Civil War veterans now, the trope of mentioning Spanish Civil War service to establish anti-fascist credentials appears to be well and truly dead.

The Funny Animal hides in a fur coat or rug: A Running Gag in Golden Age cartoons (and for some time beyond that) featured an animal character using a fur coat (generally a mink coat) or rug (usually a tiger or a bear) as a means of hiding. These were common sights in middle-class homes until the 1970s (another popular trope at the time was that of the wife tricking her husband in order to get money for a new coat), when the rising animal rights movement sparked a backlash, which coupled with that decade's economic changes made them unaffordable for anyone except rich people, and for that matter mostly limited to crass nouveau riche types.

Handmade scallop beanie hats were common in the early 20th century amongst working-class men, and evolved out of a trend to buy cheap second-hand felt fedoras as head protection from chemicals doing auto work. Creative people soon discovered they could customise them by turning them inside out and trimming off the brim with a scalloped or 'crown' effect, then adding buttons, grommets and patches to them. This made them a popular accessory with teenage boys. The result was they were used in fiction to express a working-class tough or juvenile delinquent/non-conformist. Nowadays no-one knows what they are, except that they look ridiculous, and except for...

Jughead's signature hat in Archie Comics, a hangover from the years of his design that stuck around well beyond the point that even adults knew what it was.

60's to 90's tropes

Typewriter theme music: A minor trope in old newscasts was using introduction music that emulated the sound of teleprinters, news tickers or typewriters. With the predominance of new technology in the late 1990s, those devices eventually were considered obsolete, so using such a style of musicalization wasn't making sense anymore (and younger audiences probably wouldn't be able to recognize them anyway) and since then most newscast themes have featured mostly "epic soundtrack" themes with "rockish" and (more recently) electronic sounds. During the early years of the decade, however, some radio news bulletins were still using it as a sort of homage and/or Affectionate Parody of old-time newscasts such as CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.

Instrumental covers of pop songs as background music: Between the 1950s and the mid 1990s hardly either an elevator, supermarket or a department store/shopping mall wouldn't feature instrumental knock-offs of popular songs and standards in the background (also known as "mood music" and "Muzak" after the main company in the business). But by the late 1990s, they began to be regarded as uncool, and in some cases they were seen as a form of mind control to bolster shopping. And the advent of new sound technology (namely CDs) by then phased them out in favor of the actual songs that kind of music covered.

Possibly becoming not-so-forgotten given the popularity of the Rockabye Baby! series of instrumental lullabies, as well as acts like Vitamin String Quartet. Also remains relatively common in doctor's offices.

Airplane hijackers demanding to be taken to Cuba: The airplane hijacker who demands to be taken to Cuba (inspired by a number of real hijackings) had a brief heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, but was already fading into Dead Horse territory by the 1980s, and has since been completely supplanted by hijackers with far more sinister motives.

Monty Python's Flying Circus played with this. One passenger on a direct flight to Cuba tries to hijack the plane and go to Luton. He ends up talked into jumping off the plane just in time to catch a bus "Straight to Luton," which was then hijacked by a man who demanded to be taken to Cuba. The bus changes its sign to "Straight to Cuba" and turns around.

Seinfeld references the Cuban hijacker trope with Dominican characters that are repeatedly mistaken for Cubans.

An Italian pop band founded in 1994 is named "Dirotta Su Cuba" ("hijack towards Cuba")

In P.D.Q. Bach's The Abduction of Figaro, Captain Kadd, after his "I Am" Song, says he's "taking this ship to Cuba." The other characters have to remind him that he's not on a ship ("What do you mean, I'm not on a ship?").

Cracked magazine spoofed this phenomenon in the late '60s with a few pages of strips of many other modes of transportation being hijacked, including ice-cream trucks, rickshaws, magic carpets, and horses in the Old West.

They Spent the Night Together?!: A staple of TV sitcoms as late as the '80s. Nearly every sitcom of the era had at least one episode in which everyone was up in arms because it appeared that two unmarried opposite-sex characters had slept together when they hadn't really. The denouement was always the emergence of a perfectly innocent explanation, i.e. if a car belonging to a male character was spotted in the driveway of a female character's house in the morning, it would turn out that he'd been by the night before, the car wouldn't start and he'd walked home - but not before the rest of the cast got whipped into a frenzy about how the poor girl's reputation would be ruined and how on earth could she let this happen?! Nowadays, of course, that attitude is seen as sexist rather than funny, so this trope has largely disappeared.

Ugly Slavic women: This will sound strange to European tropers, but in the '60s and '70s a common trope on American and British TV (and especially stand-up comedy) was the purported extreme ugliness of Russian women. For decades the standard-issue US pop culture Russian woman was either a muscled, mannish athlete or a troll-like creature with a mustache wearing a "babushka" (a "grandma kerchief" tied below the chin). Now, thanks to the likes of Anna Kournikova and Maria Sharapova (both of them athletes, ironically enough), this trope is now increasingly uncommon even in American media.

To paraphrase an old Soviet joke, "where once were ladies and gentlemen, there are comrades and comrades."

Watch some old (uncensored) The Tonight Show monologues — at least once a week Carson would make a joke about how mind-numbingly ugly Slavic women were. And, since he was the most respected comedian in America, everyone copied him.

Yakov Smirnoff was using this as late as The '80s: "In Russia we have a saying: 'Women are like buses.' That's it."

Speaking of Smirnoff, this trope became a running gag for his character on Night Court: In his first appearance on the show, Smirnoff's character (also named Yakov) is an immigrant from Soviet Russia who speaks almost no English, and Harry is forced by circumstance to befriend him despite the language barrier. It Makes Sense in Context. At one point, Harry gets to see the inside of Yakov's wallet and see photos of his loved ones. Harry is initially confused as to why Yakov has a photo of Soviet Premier Breshnev in his wallet, until Yakov explains that's his wife Sonia. Since then, each time Yakov made an appearance, reference is made to how painfully ugly Sonia is, until the episode where finally we get to meet Sonia... and she's absolutely gorgeous. Naturally, Yakov thinks she's a KGB impostor, even as she claims her new appearance is due to Magic Plastic Surgery, required due to an accident.

One joke involved a man going to sleep next to his lovely wife of the first type and being horrified to discover, the next morning, that she has passed her "expiration date" and transformed overnight into the second.

A VCR flashing 12:00AM: a common gag before the advent of DVDs, due to the notorious difficulty in resetting a VCR's time. The joke doesn't work in the era of DVD players, because the vast majority of them can't record, and thus have no need for clocks in the first place - and the few who do (and DVRs for that matter) have a clock either have an internal clock battery, or can fetch the local time from the broadcast metadata.

It used to show up in a lot of Cartoon Network shows like Johnny Bravo and Dexter's Laboratory, with the joke being that someone is a genius but is still unable to reset the VCR, or this being used as an example of newfound brain power. It still shows up with some CN shows from The New '10s, specifically Teen Titans Go!.

Broadcast metadata and the rise of the smartphone have also killed off the trope of multiple characters synchronizing their wristwatches in Spy Fiction and The Caper stories.

Homestar Runner referred to this phenomenon in a Strong Bad Email, acknowledging its omnipresence and the nigh-impossibility of fixing it. Strong Bad asks Bubs to fix the clock on his VCR, and Bubs "fixes" it by duct-taping another digital clock to the VCR.

Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie referenced it in their Internet Help Desk skit, as a character they call the Twelve o'Clock Flasher:

Wes: "We've got a serious Twelve o'Clock Flasher here. All the appliances in his house are always flashing twelve. It's impossible to get a Twelve o'Clock Flasher online, it can't be done! I've seen people eat their own headsets trying!"

Brought up in The X-Files Game when Detective Mary Astadorian is impressed that FBI Agent Craig Willmore's VCR isn't flashing midnight.

Astadorian: Hey it's not flashing midnight, impressive I like a man who's not afraid of technology!

Gimmicked "interactive" filmgoing experiences: 3-D Moviehas come back a few times, but what did not was everything else, up to and including systems of pulleys and winches that slung "ghosts" around the cinema to "heighten the experience", Smell-O-Vision (plus copycat AromaRama and John Waters' variant Odorama), special visors that let you see or not see monsters on the screen, and an elaborate system that gave viewers in the audience joybuzzer-style "electric" shocks so that they would think they were under attack from the movie's monster.

Part of the plot of Matinee is kids going to one of these types of films during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It's implied that they served as escapism from the Cold War.

The idea of olfactory accompaniment for movies was even older; the "scent organ" in Brave New World was merely a futuristic extrapolation of what was already being done occasionally in musical revues of the late 1920s.

There has been one such idea that's been getting rolling lately: D-BOX theaters, where the seats shake in sync with the action on-screen. 4DX theaters do use scents, but their main selling points are other enviromental effects like wind, rain and fog in addition to the aforementioned seat motion.

This sort of technique has become very common in theme park attractions, even if your average movie theater doesn't bother with such stunts.

There's a whole segment in the 1977 The Kentucky Fried Movie built around this "Beyond 3-D!" gimmick, with an usher who plays out a romantic scene on the patron to the point of pulling a knife on him when the jilted onscreen lover discovers her paramour's infidelity. The cinemagoer rushes out before the next showing of Deep Throat can start.

Rock Bimbo: The "rock bimbo" was a trope that often appeared in comedy through the '80s and early '90s, based on perceptions of female fans of rock bands like Guns n' Roses and Aerosmith as attractive, shallow, dumb, promiscuous partiers and more often than not overlapping with stereotypes of the Valley Girl and images of the singer Madonna from the time. It went away completely with the rise of grunge rock in the '90s - not to mention the rise of alternative rock, which cemented the image of women in rock as musicians in their own right and not just groupies note which itself is pretty unfair, since there have been serious female hard-rock musicians since at least the '70s (Nancy and Ann Wilson, and toward the end of the decade Deborah Harry and Joan Jett), the '60s if psychedelic rock is considered hard rock (Janis Joplin, Grace Slick), or even the '50s if rockabilly is included (Wanda Jackson) - although similar stereotypes about teenaged and college-aged women still surface. But at least the rock bimbo's look - long feathered hair, dark but skimpy clothing, and wearing lots of long necklaces topped by maybe a large crucifix - has long been a relic. Of course, even today you can attend some heavy-metal "throwback" concerts and see forty- or fiftysomething blond women trying to prove they're still relevant...dammit.

A big part of Julie Brown's comedy persona especially on the old skit comedy show The Edge.

The song "1985" by Bowling For Soup is about a woman stuck in the past, namely the year 1985, who is described as being this trope ("Where's the miniskirt made of snakeskin?/And who's the other guy singing in Van Halen?").

Teen girls' huge phone bills: Beginning in the 1950s and continuing into the Valley Girl in the 80s and 90s, part of the teenage-girl stereotype was having a phone in her room and jokes about the immense bills run up and the impossibility of anyone else getting a chance to use the phone line. The "Princess phone" was actually invented partly for the "chatty teen" demographic. Thanks to cell phones, with some help from Facebook and IMs, this bitten the dust. Remnants still exist, such as in Juno (though this was mostly just to make a hamburger phone joke) and in Totally Radicaladvertising aimed at teens. For a time, this migrated to text messages instead of phone calls, but mobile plans with free texting becoming cheaper and more ubiquitous has made this uncommon as well. Nowadays, the stereotype is simply that teenage girls are glued to their cellphones all the time.

"Motherfucker" is a black word: The term "motherfucker" as a term used by African-Americans. It's noted by a lot of older folklore/analysis of humor books that it was an African-American-only term, and this stereotype turned up in jokes as late as the 1990s. For better or worse, it's become a mainstream curseword with no racial associations, beyond a strong association with black actor Samuel L. Jackson, who says it a lot.

There's a joke to the effect that this would be the title of an African-American adaptation of Oedipus the King.

One episode of set-in-the-1920s Boardwalk Empireshows its work when black gangster Chalky uses the word and white protagonist Nucky has never heard it before.

In the 1999 film The Green Mile, a Cajun character screams the word in a fit of anger...in the setting of 1930s Louisiana. While it's true that some Cajuns were racially mixed, this one certainly didn't look like he could be. It's probably just a case of Present Day Past.

Kept alive (and subverted) by comic Bill Burr, who notes that nobody has a problem with a black guy speaking of an "Asian motherfucker", but Burr is regarded as a bigot when he talks about a "motherfucking Asian".

Educator James Herndon describes teaching in a segregated school where the white men who ran things had a policy of zero tolerance on saying "motherfucker". They believed it was such a terrible insult that it would automatically start a fight. What they didn't realize was that the worst thing you could call someone was not motherfucker, but black.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, when Roland Weary calls Billy a "motherfucker", the narration notes that the word was "still a novelty in the speech of white people in 1944."

Evangelists in airports: Airports as places where you can expect to be repeatedly accosted by evangelists, Hare Krishnas, political activists, and the like. This was once common in American airports, which were generally considered "public forums" for free speech purposes. A June 1992 Supreme Court ruling changed this, allowing airport authorities to make reasonable regulations to avoid congestion and disruption to air travelers, and 9/11 got rid of them for good.

While the scene is still funny, some of the vicarious thrill of Robert Stack's Foe-Tossing Charge in Airplane! is lost on a modern audience. A 1980s traveler really did have to pass through similar gauntlets of airport attention-seekers, and probably wanted to handle them in Rex Kramer's no-nonsense fashion. However, even if the setting is unfamiliar, the behaviour itself is recognisable to anyone who's ever walked down a pedestrianized high street.

There are even some episodes of The Simpsons that get in on this. Homer makes fun of all the people imploring him to love his neighbor until the two at the end of the line persuade him to join a cult. Another Simpsons episode inverted the trope with two American missionaries in suits showing up in an airport in India and a Hare-Krishna muttering: "Oh, great... Christians."

This was parodied in Osmosis Jones, where the Stomach is depicted as an airport full of arrivals. Near the bottom of the escalators where passengers get off are Hair Cell Krishnas. According to the commentary, test audiences got a kick out of them due to how silly they look and act but didn't really understand the reference.

Inferior Japanese products : For a few years after World War II, there was the stereotype that any product made in Japan was very cheap and of poor quality. We can see this trope was alive as late as the 70's, (e.g., Miles Monroe shouting "Goddamn Japanese model!" in Sleeper). This is even referenced in Back to the Future Part III, where 1955 Doc Brown doesn't seem surprised when a circuit failed since it was made in Japan (Marty then makes it clear that in his time, the best products are actually made in Japan; words that truly shock Doc Brown). Around the 80's, and thanks to its economic rise, this image changed, and cutting-edge technology and high quality are usually what anyone thinks about Japanese products. Sure, maybe the idea of Japan Takes Over the World was a li'l too much, but it is still regarded as a super-power that excels in a lot of industries, specially cars and electronic devices.

In his book Dave Barry Does Japan, Dave expounds on this idea (excerpt here) with "Back then, of course, we thought all Japanese products were cheap...The suggestion that Japan could make real cars would have been laughable." He then describes how slowly more and more quality Japanese products were being imported until it was too late and Americans were hooked.

The modern equivalent of this is technology made in China (specifically Hong Kong), where for a long time, products were made so cheaply, with such poor attention to detail, that many Westerners would outright avoid Chinese Manufacturers. This was unfair, as there are good manufacturers in China - it's just the best workers have worked for Western companies over there due to them being most profitable. The image is starting to improve, with such technology as Huawei phones being popular worldwide, and the low price points being a selling point.

All Old Folks Like Matlock: a common joke in sitcoms and stand-up routines was to make fun of how old people like that show. Of course, nowadays is hard to find anyone not only using the joke, but even remembering the show at all. Fridge Brilliance: The elderly audience for the show in the 1990's are mostly dead now.

Almost Live! expanded this to include people in southern King County, which was a predominantly white, blue-collar, working-class area looked down upon as a bunch of uncouth hicks by urban Seattle during the show's run.

This is a borderline Running Gag with the old folks in The Simpsons. Abe loves the show so much that he demands that Simpson's home be destroyed in the "Sideshow Bob Roberts" episode because it is blocking the route of the "Matlock Expressway".

Lisa: How can you people turn on snakes after all they've done for you? Grampa: I'm an old man, I hate everything but Matlock. Ooh, it's on now.

A bizarre variation of this trope happens in the How I Met Your Mother episode "Last Time in New York" (originally aired in 2013). In that episode, the actor Mandy Patinkin is show to be like catnip to the elderly, with the mere mention of his name attracting droves of them. The gag is very similarly to the older Matlock jokes, but it remains unclear why Mandy Patinkin of all people would work as a 2010s substitute for Matlock.

The Anarchist Hacker: The hacker who was "For The People" and hacked only into governments and corporations for fun as a way of "Sticking it to The Man" is all but forgotten except by those who remember eighties movies in general or that scene from Sneakers where Amnesty International, Greenpeace, and the United Negro College Fund all got generous donations from the Republican Party, courtesy of our heroes. Today, hackers are more likely to be depicted as working for The Man, sometimes as a Sell-Out. Or greedy opportunists no better than The Man. They could be scammers, phishers, identity thieves, blackmailers, and even hack into companies to steal customers' personal and financial information, while purporting merely to expose security problems. In general, the modern generation of hackers find themselves now hated by the very same "People" that the old hackers used to identify with and champion. It's probably why few people identify themselves as hackers now.

Mr. Robot plays with this trope. Mr. Robot tells Elliot about the hacker collective fsociety, which has a goal of hacking Evil Corp in order to release everyone from debt. Elliot himself also hacks various jerkasses, adulterers, and pedophiles in order to punish them. The season finale deals with him considering the ramifications of society's now successful hack on Evil Corp, which has caused a worldwide financial crisis.

Surrogate Cool Big Brother characters in anime and manga, that is, older characters who hung around with younger characters who weren't necessarily related to them, but went on exciting adventures with them anyway, were fairly big in the early days of Shonen demographic manga as well as some tokusatsu, such as Goro and Hiroshi in Godzilla vs. Megalon. This trope was killed for twofold reasons: The changing family dynamic in Japanese culture after the 70s were over, and the fact that adult men hanging around child characters in dangerous situations constantly is frowned upon heavily. In addition, the character dynamics of many, such as the aforementioned Goro and Hiroshi, simply leads modern audiences to think that the "big bros" are simply a gay couple with an adopted child.

The Fox Network as "a hard-core sex channel" (in the words of Marge Simpson): Well into the 1990s, media commentators would commonly refer to "the Fox edge" - the willingness of the "fourth" network owned by Rupert Murdoch to air programming depicting sex, violence, and general antisocial behavior with a frankness hitherto not seen on American television. Married... with Children set the template in 1987 with the sociopathic Bundy family, and they were followed soon enough by The Simpsons (who themselves weren't above poking fun at this trope). Indeed, later in the '90s when Fox premiered Ally McBeal (a show about a quirky female attorney), they joked that for once they were going to focus on a woman's mind instead of her body. Although by then, NBC and to a lesser extent ABC began relaxing their S&Ps regarding sex, and CBS (the network most traditionally associated with "family values") caught up in terms of sensationalism in the early 2000s, primarily with Survivor (the Trope Codifier for all the reality shows that followed), and in the 2010s Fox has toned down these aspects in tune with its competitors. Add to that how premium cable and on-demand services go even further than broadcast TV ever can, and how its earlier series see less risqué as time goes on. The notoriously right-wing stance of Fox News Channel has also made Fox's former image a little ironic (even though its commentators are more often hawkish or fiscally conservative, not puritanically conservative).

Gay Men Really Love Their Mommies. In pop culture of decades past, there was a perceived correlation between a man being gay and having a very unhealthy attachment to his mother. Best seen in the novelization and a deleted scene from the movie of Back to the Future, where Marty, anticipating what might happen on his date with Lorraine, fears it might turn him gay (the punchline being the Doc being clueless about that usage of the term). The 1990s changed this perception, with a really late example featured in 1993's The Powers That Be, in which the senator's illegitimate daughter, upon learning that a guest likes long walks on the beach with his mother, immediately asks if he's gay. Now, this trope is so far forgotten that the writer of thisCracked article expresses genuine confusion in his discussion of the deleted scene.

The Check is in the Mail. Once a valid excuse as to why a debt for loan or service has not been paid, it later evolved into jokes about said excuses. The joke was, of course, "the mail is slow, blame them". As technology improved, however, money orders and certified checks replacing ordinary checks, and then direct bank deposits and internet buying became more popular, not to mention options other than the regular post office. The joke is almost never used now.

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